


Smells Like Teen Spirit

by the_deep_magic



Series: Nina 'verse [1]
Category: Actor RPF, Star Trek RPF
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:30:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_deep_magic/pseuds/the_deep_magic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A future in which Zach and Chris are the loving parents of a distressed – no, really, HEARTBROKEN – teenager</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smells Like Teen Spirit

_****_The slammed door startled Chris so much that his pencil tore a hole in the thin newsprint of the crossword puzzle.   That sharp sound was followed by the dull thuds of footsteps up the stairs and a soft, melancholy _whump_ that could only be produced by an anguished teenage girl collapsing into her bed.  
   
Zach set down his book. “You want me to—“  
   
“It’s alright,” said Chris, already getting to his feet. “I think I know what this is about.” He leaned down to kiss Zach’s forehead before heading up the stairs.  
   
The door was closed, but not locked. They had a rule in the house – closed doors for privacy were fine, but locks were not. Chris heard the muffled sound of crying on the other side of the door. He considered giving her some time, but he didn’t want her to stew in whatever this was either, so he knocked quietly. “It’s me. Can I come in?”  
   
There was no response for a long time, and then: “I don’t care. Whatever.”  
   
It wasn’t a “no,” which Chris interpreted as Teenager for “yes, but it would be uncool of me to tell you that I want you to come in.” Years of being surrounded by Hollywood types had conditioned him well for teenage passive-aggression. He found Nina curled on her side around a pillow, her back to the door. Chris sat down on the edge of the bed, careful to give her some space. “Feel like talking about it?”  
   
“No,” she said, but Chris waited patiently. “I broke up with Kevin.”  
   
Inwardly, Chris was doing a joyful little dance over the fact that his baby girl had finally come to her senses and dumped the dickweed on his ass, but all he said was, “Hmm.”  
   
“He was cheating on me with that _skank_ from physics class.”  
   
Though he had guessed Kevin was probably a lying scumbag (he knew the type), this was the first confirmation Chris had gotten that he’d actually lied to Nina. He was surprised by his own levelheadedness under the circumstances. “Want me to have him beaten up?”  
   
“What? Pop, no! I mean… could you even do that?”  
   
“Hey, your dad knows some people who know some people. It wouldn’t be too hard to arrange anything from a slight concussion to the ever-popular double-kneecap smash.”  
   
“No.” A pause. “I don’t think.” Another pause. “I’ll let you know.”  
   
“Think it over very carefully. But don’t mention it to your dad unless you’re serious – he might try to do it himself.”  
   
Nina laughed weakly until she got cut off by a particularly violent hiccup. “Dad? Beat somebody up? Yeah, like that would happen.”  
   
“You’d be surprised,” Chris said with a small smile. “He’s got quite a protective streak if he’s pushed.”  
   
There was blissful silence for a moment, then a fresh wave of despair crashed and Nina was sobbing again.  “What am I gonna do?” she wailed. “I have to see his slimy face every day, and he’ll probably be swapping spit with Fiona between every class.”  
   
“Fiona the physics floozy?”  
   
“Uh-huh.”  
   
“Very alliterative.”  
   
“Pop, I’m miserable here. Pay attention!”  
   
Chris smiled. If she was self-aware enough to get on his case, it meant she would be alright. He set a supportive hand on her arm. “I know you’re miserable, Neeners, but I’m really proud of you.”  
   
“Proud of me?” she moaned. “For what? Being a lonely, pathetic loser?”  
   
“For dumping his Neanderthal butt. I think you know you deserve better than that. Even better than Cro-Magnon man. Let’s see if we can’t get you a fully evolved Homo sapiens this time around.”  
   
She let out a watery chuckle. “Might have to switch high schools for that.”  
   
“I’m sorry to have to tell you, but you might have to wait until you get out of high school altogether.”  
   
 “So when do guys get their act together?”  
   
Chris made a thinking noise. “I’ll let you know when it happens to me.”   Nina rolled over to face him, and he handed her a tissue. She blew her nose with a loud honk, and Chris only barely kept from laughing – she’d never been able to blow her nose at a normal volume since she was a child. “I think your dad managed to grow up somewhere around his mid-twenties.”  
   
“That’s, like, ten years away!” she moaned, and Chris was silently relieved that she hadn’t responded something to the effect of _well, I’ll just have to date 25-year-olds, then_.  
   
“Hey, you never know,” he said, taking the tissue from her and tossing it into the garbage can. “You might meet the rare male specimen that matures early. One of them’s got to be out there somewhere. Law of probability and all that.”  
   
“How did you know?” Nina asked, shifting to sit up against the headboard. “With Dad, how did you know he was The One?”  
   
Chris thought about it – he knew a question like this would be coming eventually, but he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer it. “Well, it’s probably not what you want to hear, but I don’t think anybody really knows. Not at the beginning. If they did, no one would ever get their heart broken, but they wouldn’t fully have to trust the other person, either. It’s really only looking back that I know Zach – your dad – is the person I’m supposed to be with.”  
   
“Great. So how does that help me?”  
   
“Well, none of that’s to say you can’t be smart about it. Take Kevin, for example. He only seemed to want to take you out on nights when he didn’t have any other plans, but he expected you to skip rehearsals to spend time with him.”  
   
“Yeah, I guess that was kinda douchey of him.”  
   
Chris narrowed his eyes. “Watch your vocabulary, young lady. And no, that was _extremely_ douchey of him.”  
   
Nina giggled. “Okay, but how did Dad make you fall in love with him?”  
   
“Hmm… I don’t know that it was just one thing. It wasn’t like he slipped love poems into my locker or declared his love under the full moon in Paris. We were friends for a long time first.”  
   
“So when did you go from friends to more-than-friends?”  
   
Chris laughed, losing himself in thought for a moment. “It depends on who you ask. Uncle Joe will tell you that we were always in love and just didn’t know it. Your dad’s friend Kristen will say that we spent so much time together that we were already pretty much married before we knew we loved each other.”  
   
“Okay, but tell me the real story.”  
   
“Well, we did our first movie together and we got along really well. But there was a long gap between when we finished shooting the movie and when it came out, so we went from seeing each other all day, every day to maybe once a week, at most. I thought I just missed the whole cast, the fun of working together. But when we were getting ready for the press tour, I remember thinking to myself, _wow, there’s so much I have to tell Zach_.”  
   
“So that was when you knew?”  
   
Chris smiled fondly. “Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Up until then, I’d only been in love with girls, so I thought I was just… lonely in a really specific way, I guess? But seeing him again was like… like getting a big breath of air after being underwater for a long time.”  
   
“So _that_ was when you knew?”  
   
“Hush and let me tell the story. Anyway, while we were on the press tour, I told your dad that I liked him, and we… do the kids still say ‘hooked up’?”  
   
Nina groaned at clapped her hands over her ears. “ _POP_! Never, _ever_ say that again!  _Especially_ not about you and Dad!”  
   
“Sorry, sorry!”  
   
“Okay, so, press tour, blah blah blah, happily ever after.”  
   
“Not exactly.” Nina rolled her eyes and Chris folded his arms across his chest. “Hey, you said you wanted the real story, right?” His daughter nodded contritely. “Well, remember that we’re both guys and therefore a little bit slower on the uptake when it comes to these things.”  
   
This made Nina grin, so Chris took a deep breath and continued. “You know your grandfather died when your dad was little, right? Well, he also got his heart broken really badly by the guy he dated all through college, so between those two, he had – still has, sometimes – a really hard time trusting people. He doesn’t mean to, but there’s some small part of him that’s convinced that the people he loves will leave him. That part’s gotten much smaller over the years, but it’s still there. Anyway, a few months after the press tour, he kind of… freaked out on me. I think he thought if he pushed me away first, it wouldn’t hurt as much.”  
   
“He dumped you?”  
   
“He tried. And he was a stubborn bast— a stubborn jerk about it, too.  We both kind of… fell apart without each other. He barely left the house except to go to work – he was still working on Heroes then – and I started making late night phone calls to everyone I knew because I just wanted to talk to someone.”  
   
 “So what happened?” Nina whispered, completely involved in the story now.  
   
“Your dad showed up at my door in the middle of the afternoon one day. He’d walked over in the heat. Didn’t call first, didn’t apologize. Just stepped inside and put his arms around me and held on. We stayed that way for… I don’t even know how long. Later that night, after— just, later, I realized how hard that walk must have been for him, wondering the whole way over if I’d given up on him. It doesn’t sound like such a scary thing until you’re the one making that walk, not knowing if you’ll get your heart crushed. Then it’s the bravest thing you can do.”  
   
“Wow.”  
   
“Yeah. He’s not always the best person at talking about how he feels, but when it’s important, he will always put the people he loves first. And that’s you and me, kiddo.”  
   
They sat for a few moments in comfortable silence, Nina thinking and Chris quietly reminiscing, until Nina’s phone rang – the ringtone was a Nirvana song, which she lovingly referred to as “an oldie.”  
   
“Oh, Shannon’s finally calling me back. I need to take this.”  
   
Chris chuckled and leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Okay. Thanks for letting your old man jabber on for a while.”  
   
She smiled up at him then – a real, genuine smile that made Chris’ heart lift in his chest. Then she was breathlessly listing to Shannon the myriad reasons that Kevin needed to go jump off a cliff, and Chris quietly excused himself, shutting the door behind him. He was a little surprised to see Zach standing out in the hall, leaning casually back against the wall.  
   
“How long were you standing there?”  
   
“Long enough to hear you tell your teenage daughter how we ‘hooked up.’”  
   
“Why? What do the kids call it these days?” Chris asked as he followed Zach down the stairs and back out to the living room.  
   
“It’s not that, you idiot. How would you like it if your parents told you they hooked up?”  
   
“Ick.  But that’s different – we’re the hip, young parents.”  
   
“Chris, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve got what can be definitively termed a ‘bad knee’ and this—” Zach tugged at the silver hair at his temples “—is not hair dye.”  
   
Chris pouted.   “I love your gray. It’s sexy. When you wear your glasses to bed, it’s like I’m being seduced by a kinky college professor. I think I’ll get you a tweed jacket for your birthday.”  
   
“I’m only three years older than you, you twat!”  
   
“Shh! She’ll hear you, and I thought we were trying to encourage her _not_ to swear like a longshoreman.” But then Chris dropped his voice to a low purr and leaned in. “C’mon, say it – say, _Christopher, your grades have been slipping. What are you willing to do to earn an A_?”  
   
“You’re an ass.”  
   
“Yeah, but you love me anyway.”  
   
Zach rolled his eyes, and Chris was reminded where Nina had picked up that particular gesture. “I do. God help me, I do.” He sighed as Chris pulled him in for a deep, lingering kiss.   
   
Chris patiently teased Zach’s closed lips with the point of his tongue, refusing to stop until Zach opened to him, humming with deep contentment when he finally did.   He held Zach tightly, anchoring him to the moment with the strength of his hands on Zach’s hip, threaded through the soft hair at the back of his neck. When he came up for air, Chris whispered, “Love you – always” before claiming Zach’s mouth again. He lost himself for a few long minutes in the warmth of Zach’s arms.  
   
When they broke apart, Zach finally seemed to have come around. “How long do you think Nina will be on the phone with Shannon?” he asked with a devious grin.  
   
“Oh, an hour, at least. Maybe two.”  
   
“Good,” Zach murmured, grabbing Chris by the shoulders and walking him backward toward the master bedroom. “Now, Mr. Pine, about that A…”


End file.
